So far, this book has concentrated on a particular society and a particular proto-industry. The worsted industry of the Württemberg Black Forest, as we have seen, arose and survived for more than two centuries in a society characterized by ‘state corporatism’: a symbiotic cooperation between the state and privileged corporate groups. As previous chapters have shown, this institutional framework profoundly affected economic, demographic and social developments in this proto-industrial region between the late sixteenth and the late eighteenth century. What implications, though, do the Württemberg findings have for developments in early modern Europe more widely? Was Württemberg simply an interesting regional exception, and did most other European proto-industries see the growth of capitalist markets, as was claimed in the original theories of proto-industrialization? Or was Württemberg in fact quite typical, and did ‘state corporatism’ predominate in many European societies to the end of the ancien régime, with potentially far-reaching effects on their economic, demographic and social development? To answer these questions, this chapter surveys what is known about the social and institutional framework surrounding proto-industries in early modern Europe as a whole.

The original theorists, as we saw in Chapter 3, were agreed that Europe was a ‘traditional’, ‘peasant’ or ‘non-market’ society before proto-industrialization and a ‘capitalist’ or ‘market’ society after protoindustrialization. Traditional non-market institutions – the village community, the seigneurial system, the privileged town, the guild, the merchant company – broke down, and were replaced by unregulated capitalistic markets.